Only knowledgeable people. The terms freethinker and free thought were invented by atheists and agnostics to put a spin on their anti-religious view. It sounds better than League of Belligerent Atheists or The Godless - though more accurate, such titles can only be adopted in a country run by militant atheists. Daniel Dennett has suggested atheists should call themselves "Brights". "Humanist" was another similar term.
I think terms like Society of the Godless and League of Belligerent Atheists are refreshingly honest.
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The term Free-Thinker emerged toward the end of the 17th century in England to describe those who stood in opposition to the institution of the Church, and of literal belief in the Bible. The beliefs of these individuals were centered on the concept that people could understand the world through consideration of nature. Such positions were formally documented for the first time in 1697 by William Molyneux in a widely publicized letter to John Locke, and more extensively in 1713, when Anthony Collins wrote his Discourse of Free-Thinking, which gained substantial popularity. In France, the concept first appeared in publication in 1765 when Denis Diderot, Jean le Rond d'Alembert and Voltaire included an article on Libre-Penseur in their Encyclopédie; the article was strongly atheistic. The European freethought concepts spread so widely that even places as remote as the Jotunheimen, in Norway, had well-known freethinkers, such as Jo Gjende, by the 19th century.
The Freethinker magazine was first published in Britain in 1881.
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